Jochen Guck studied physics in Würzburg and received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, USA. In 2002 he joined the Institute of Soft Matter Physics at the University of Leipzig as a research assistant. In 2007 he joined the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge as a lecturer, where he later became a reader. In 2012, Guck was appointed Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Cellular Machines at the Biotechnology Center of the TU Dresden and served as its Executive Director. Since October 1, 2018, he has been Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light and Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. Since August 2020 he holds the professorship for Biological Optomechanics at the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. Guck has been awarded the Young Scientists Award in Biomedical Photonics of the DKFZ Heidelberg, the Cozzarelli Award of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and the Paterson Medal of the Institute of Physics (UK), among others, for his work.